


Battered Books

by mirandamyth



Series: Sidelines [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abstract, Books, Drabble, Gen, post season eight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 16:07:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/928475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mirandamyth/pseuds/mirandamyth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just drabble about Dean reading.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battered Books

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I have insomnia.

Dean used to read a lot, before Sam came back. He was on his own a lot, back then. John drank more, hid more, and hunted alone. Dean, unused to empty rooms, started picking up quarter books at thrift stores. He started with the few Sam left behind - he fell in  love with Jay Gatsby, he rafted the Mississippi with Huck and Jim, and he saved Middle Earth with Sam and Frodo. He would steal them from libraries, returning them to different branches, different states. He took high school reading lists, and dove into Steinbeck, Orwell, Poe; he discovered Vonnegut, Kerouac, Salinger. He absorbed these characters, he collected stories about heroes, about broken people; he would read them to the drone of reruns and soap operas. Once Sam came back, there were fewer empty spaces, more to do, less time.

But Sam's here, now, sleeping eighteen out of twenty four hours, and Dean has nothing but empty spaces and an angry prisoner. So he reads. He starts with the Men of Letters library, but there's too much history there, too many memories. He can't distract himself with wendigos or vampires or women in white. He'd fought nearly every damn creature out there, lost too much doing it. He's in Sam's room straightening up, when he notices the bottom shelves of Sam's bookcase. While everything at eye-level is about rituals and things that go bump in the night, the bottom two shelves are a haphazard collection of classics, mass market paperbacks, and literary anthologies. Dean examines the small collection, unsurprised to find Hemingway and Emerson (Sam has always loved that pretentious crap), it's the battered Stephen King books that surprise him. So, Dean starts reading fiction. Focusing on fictional people and their fictional problems let him at least pretend to ignore his own. He lives half in reality; only when Sam's awake does he come all the way out of his preoccupation. 

It's not Sam that he's distracting himself from. It's the voice in the back of his head that's currently screaming at him to _find Cas, goddamn it._ Though Sam is improving, the rest of him is fighting the urge to grab his coat and go, reminding that voice that Cas is a big boy, and that Sam is sometimes too tired to stay awake after simply walking down the hall and eating lunch. Cas's cell is long since gone, and, though Dean's kept up his nightly prayers, he's not sure if it's a dead line he's calling there, too. So Dean reads. 


End file.
